Casa de mi padre/The Cabin the Woods

Watching Casa de mi Padre you get the sense that Will Ferrell was sitting around and just thought 'wouldn't it be funny to make a telenovela-style film entirely in spanish' and then just went and did it with some buddies. That's essentially all this is, and I appreciate it. The premise and execution is sufficiently silly that the film is a fun watch, but it does ultimately prove too thin to support a full feature. As a half an hour episode of a sketch show it would have been great, but at 80 minutes you definitely can feel it stretching. I can easily see this turning into one of those films that you don't seek out, but when its (heaviliy-edited version) is showing on Comedy central to stop flipping channels for 20 minutes to watch.

The Cabin in The Woods

This movie is awesome. I hate to be one of those guys who says you shouldn't know anything about a film before seeing it, because that's usually not necessary, but here I think that's really true. The great pleasure of the film is seeing how inventively the story unfolds, as well as how it plays with all the tropes of the genre it's playing with (in this case horror). That last sentence makes its seem like a parody, which it most assuredly isn't (at least not in The Naked Gun sense). This is more of a subversion, and you don't need to be intimitately familiar with horror films to enjoy it. But whatever, just go see it. Much like Joss Whedon's work with Buffy and Angel, it has the right mix of irony and sincerity to keep you engaged and laughing the whole time. Seriously, from the opening sequence to the absolutely insane ending I was grinning like a fool. I'm not claiming that this is the greatest film of all time, or that its perfect, but its a lot of fun and I enjoyed the hell out of it